Chapter 247 – Lord Jansen (2)

After Yerim left with Hoffman’s bereaved family, Zahina and I headed to the basement of the castle.

We dismissed all those who were following us and descended underground.

Opening the iron door that the mages had locked, we entered a storage room in the castle basement.

The gate connected to Jeju Island was located here in the castle basement, in what used to be a wine cellar.

The wine cellar, which had been relatively intact, now bore little resemblance to its former self.

Most of the alcohol that had been in the cellar had been distributed to refugees over the past six months, with only a small portion remaining.

Instead, this cellar had been transformed from a wine storage into a mage’s laboratory.

Various experimental equipment was placed on one side, and a large magic circle was drawn on the floor in the center of the cellar.

In the middle of that magic circle floated a gate that had not yet been activated.

Unlike the temporary gates we had made before, this was a properly constructed gate.

In front of the gate, a mage was making final adjustments.

I approached the gate and said to the mage:

“It took longer than expected.”

The mage who was finishing the gate adjustments glanced at me with a sidelong look.

“The gate itself didn’t take long. The difficult part was making sure others wouldn’t notice it.”

Indeed, for Yelena, who had created a temporary gate by herself, making an official gate shouldn’t have been difficult.

When she first mentioned the production time, she said it would take less than a month.

But we couldn’t start building it right away after hearing that.

If we had made it without proper preparation, other mages would have detected it immediately.

“I utilized the Demon King’s dimension-severing magic to hide the mana flowing outward, then created a small hole in that magic to connect with another dimension. It was truly not an easy spell.”

She explained while drawing another magic circle in the air, but once again, it was impossible for me to understand it.

I could only tell that it had been a truly difficult magic.

As she said, the reason it took so long to complete this gate was because of the magic needed to conceal it.

Of course, there was no absolute need to create a gate while hiding it from the outside.

Even without making a gate, restoring the domain wasn’t difficult.

Although it took time, we had already restored the castle and city, and completed farmland for self-sufficiency.

Even now, people from neighboring domains continued to arrive, gradually increasing our domain’s population.

With sufficient funds and a portal connected to the Imperial capital, there was no need to worry about raw material supplies.

Of course, as time passed and the new royalty established by the Empire began to rule the country again, various complicated matters related to relationships with neighboring domains and the domain’s specialty products would arise, but those were concerns for the future.

In this situation, creating a gate again was clearly not something that would help in governing the domain.

Moreover, if we were discovered making a gate so soon after the major war with the Demon King, it could lead to tremendous misunderstandings.

But we couldn’t avoid making the gate.

Among my companions, two were from Earth. Plus, there was one from the Divine Tree race.

While Zahina didn’t seem to want to return, the two from Earth, Yerim and Irene, were different.

Even if we weren’t sending them back permanently, we couldn’t cut off their connection to Earth and make them live here.

Additionally, there were past connections and newly formed relationships remaining on Earth.

Honestly, if they had been my connections alone, I might have been able to ignore them, but these were people who had lived together with my companions.

It was difficult to turn our backs on them now that the Demon King had fallen.

With the Demon King gone, there wouldn’t be any danger.

And if that was the case, we could obtain many things from Earth.

‘Coffee, cola, cider, beer, soju, movies, dramas, watches…’

Already, the Earth consumer goods I had stored in my space-expanded pouch were running low.

Items I never thought I would need before visiting Earth.

Back then, I thought that after obtaining a domain, hiring people would make everything more or less the same.

But that wasn’t the case.

Although the domain wasn’t fully functional yet, those items couldn’t be replaced by people.

The same was true for magic.

The omnipotence of magic that I had seen in fantasy novels was all false.

“They say if you sit, you want to lie down, and if you lie down, you want to sleep.”

Now that I had obtained a domain and life had become comfortable, I missed modern conveniences even more.

Waking up to music in the morning, drinking a cup of coffee, eating a delicious breakfast, spending the day, and falling asleep watching videos at night.

Even as a lord, such a lifestyle was difficult to achieve.

“Above all, it’s hard to find kimchi or gochujang here.”

“And coffee too.”

Yelena chimed in to my muttering.

Our space mage seemed to have become a caffeine addict during her time on Earth.

Thanks to that, Yelena had taken the initiative in creating the gate.

And now, the fixed gate was complete.

It was time to activate it.

“Opening the door.”

I nodded at Yelena’s words, and she infused mana into the magic circle.

The magic circle glowed brightly, and the gate, which had only been a frame until now, began to emit light.

Woong.

Another world began to appear inside the gate, which had previously been transparent with the back side visible.

The image in the gate became clearer, rippling like water.

As time passed, the scene visible in the gate was an indoor space similar to this one.

However, that interior had cement walls, different from here.

After the gate was activated, I looked at Yelena.

Yelena immediately understood what I wanted.

She said to me:

“It’s safe. This gate cannot be detected from the outside.”

With the grand mage’s confirmation, there was no need to worry.

I nodded and crossed through the gate.

“Welcome.”

As I crossed the gate, a young mage who had been waiting bowed to me.

It was Irene.

She was now a proper mage by any standard.

Of course, she still looked young as she was still in her teens, but she had enough skill to come to the opposite dimension and complete the gate with her master.

The problem was that her master was from Ea, so she seemed to have adopted a way of thinking that wasn’t typical of Earth people.

This was evident in how she was now properly greeting me as her lord.

While her master treated me casually, she emphasized rules for her disciple.

Looking at this master and disciple, it seemed like their roles were reversed, which was a bit absurd.

The place I arrived at through the gate was somewhere I had been before, the basement of the Jeju government building.

Although I hadn’t been down to this basement before, I could immediately tell with my heightened senses.

“Is everyone waiting upstairs?”

“Yes. I’ve prevented them from coming in here.”

Irene immediately answered my question.

“There must have been some objections.”

“There were some people like that, but I and the administrators of Jeju Island explained things well and took care of it.”

A precise answer.

The reason people couldn’t dismiss Irene wasn’t just because of her magic, but because of her changed personality… Irene had definitely changed from before.

She used to be a quiet girl who followed her master, but now she had become a mage who showed excessive loyalty to me as her lord.

Even her recent words were hard to take at face value.

It wasn’t the first time that Irene had intervened and frightened the domain residents while we were organizing the domain.

Unlike the two Saintesses who were respected by the people and the mage who rarely showed her face, Irene had become the person the domain residents feared the most.

‘Surely she hasn’t killed anyone?’

I briefly had such a thought, but I didn’t ask Irene about it.

Instead, I just glanced at Yelena, who had crossed the gate behind me.

When I looked at her, Yelena twitched her eyebrow and said:

“Sigh, Irene’s change isn’t because of me. She decided to be like this on her own. Right?”

I looked at Irene again upon hearing this unexpected statement.

“Yes. I decided to follow Lord Egger, who saved me and saved the world, for the rest of my life.”

Irene’s words were filled with sincerity.

Having heard such unexpected words, I tried to object:

“I’m not a hero anymore.”

“That doesn’t matter. The fact that you saved me and saved the world hasn’t changed. Besides, even though you’re not a hero now, you’ve come to Earth like this to save this world.”

“No, I didn’t make the gate to save Earth…”

“You’ve always spoken like that, my lord. Saintess Yerim said that you’re a tsundere.”

Tsundere coming up here?

I wondered what on earth Yerim had been telling the women.

As I looked around in astonishment, both Yelena and Zahina were nodding at Irene’s words.

“You always say you’re doing things for yourself, but in the end, you’ve saved everyone. Well, it’s not strange that Irene acts like this.”

“That’s right. The term ‘tsundere’ fits Sir Knight’s behavior perfectly.”

With even Zahina saying such things, I had nothing more to say.

I shook my head and said to the other two women:

“I hope you two don’t change.”

While Irene might be beyond help, I didn’t want the companions I had barely managed to gain after becoming a lord to change like that.

At my words, the two mages looked at each other and smiled.

“Don’t worry. Neither Yerim nor we have given up yet.”

I shook my head at Yelena’s words.

Though I might be slow, after traveling together for so long, I couldn’t possibly misunderstand what she meant.

We had defeated the Demon King, so there was no reason for companions with such extraordinary abilities to continue traveling with me.

Being Saintesses and grand mages, they could secure noble positions wherever they went.

They could obtain domains better than mine.

Yet they stayed with me, and there could be only one reason for that.

Honestly, I wasn’t indifferent either.

All three were good people, people too good for me.

But I couldn’t make a decision.

I thought it wasn’t the right time yet.

The domain had just begun its recovery, and the world was still in chaos.

It seemed too early to think about heirs.

‘No, that’s not it.’

I tried to make excuses, but it was too forced.

In truth, timing didn’t matter.

Since the Demon King was dead, it didn’t matter when I made a decision.

Yet I continued to delay the decision because of my indecisiveness.

It wasn’t easy to choose just one of them, and my monogamous values from my previous life made it difficult to take all three as wives.

But I couldn’t keep dragging this out.

“I should reach a conclusion before the end of this year.”

At my words, both Zahina and Yelena’s eyes sparkled.

“Really?”

“That’s a relief.”

With the two delighted women, I opened the door of the basement wide.

We went straight up to the ground floor.

On the ground floor, in the building lobby, people were waiting for us.

Deputy Mayor Yang from Busan, or rather Prime Minister Yang now, and Seo-eun who had left Daejeon, passed through Jeonju City, and come to Jeju Island, along with her husband Jae-ha.

People I knew were waiting for us.

“Welcome. We’ve completed the preparations for departure.”

I nodded at Prime Minister Yang’s words.

There was no need to delay when everything was ready.

It was time to fulfill the purpose for which everyone had gathered and for which my party members and I had crossed the gate.

The reclamation of the mainland.

After six months of preparation, it was time for the Jeju government to reclaim the mainland.

“Then let’s go.”

I led the waiting people out of the Jeju government building.